


Snowmelt

by imaginary_golux



Category: Schneewittchen | Snow White (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 08:43:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_golux/pseuds/imaginary_golux
Summary: The Witch-Queen would like to explain why she spent so much time trying to kill her stepdaughter - and it has nothing to do with beauty.Beta by my Best Beloved, Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw.





	Snowmelt

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Тающий снег](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17825450) by [WTF Women 2019 (WTF_Women_2018)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Women_2018/pseuds/WTF%20Women%202019)



The thing everyone fails to understand is that she _wasn’t human_. I mean, really. Skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony? That’s not _natural_. I should know. I _am_ a witch, after all, and a powerful one. You will note that I do not say a _good_ one. Witches don’t get as old as I have without learning to be a little...amoral.

But in any case. I digress. The child wasn’t human, that was plain enough to anyone with the eyes to see it - that is, anyone who could see magic. There were half a dozen little signs. She didn’t bleed, for one thing: when she pricked herself with a needle or fell and skinned her knee, as children will, no blood rose to the wound, and she healed almost instantly, snow-pale skin unblemished within moments. She did not weep, either. She sobbed, sometimes, when she wished others to feel sorry for her, or in anger at some small disagreement or other, but no tears fell from her dark eyes. Her pupils were the wrong shape, too, subtly pointed like a cat’s, and if you caught her wandering in the halls at night and she glanced up at your candle, her eyes reflected the light, green and gold and somehow terrible.

And everyone loved her. That’s not actually natural. Oh, it’s natural for everyone to _pretend_ to love a young princess, especially one whose father dotes upon her, but it’s not natural for them all to _actually_ adore her. People fell all over each other to bring her the ripest fruit, the freshest bread, the finest cuts of meat. She was always being given toys and jewelry and new clothing, anything and everything she ever desired - she had only to look at something, and then widen her inhuman eyes at its owner, and immediately it was hers.

Her father actually managed to hold out against her pleading, sometimes, when she asked for something too big or precious. I was rather impressed with the man. He was purely mortal, so far as I could tell, and I think the only witchcraft his wife ever worked was summoning the child - and that cost her life, too - but he did manage to at least attempt to keep a rein on his daughter.

He died when she was ten. “Fell down the stairs,” if you please, and the child sobbing at the bottom, tearless and wide-eyed. I think I was the only person who thought it anything but a truly dreadful accident. It certainly was _dreadful_ , I could agree to that, and did. Of all the mortal men I’ve married, he was one of the finest: strong-willed and moral and even-tempered, as so few are. But I was not there to watch over him, and though I wove protections around him to keep any _magic_ from harming him, I did not think to protect him from physical harm, even if I could have. I did not think the child would use such crude methods. It was my error, and I have regretted it ever since.

Her father’s death didn’t actually help her much, since that left me on the throne - a ten-year-old child, even a very beloved one, cannot become queen in her own right. But in one thing it _did_ aid her: since I did not indulge her as everyone else did, I became, in the eyes of all the people, her implacable enemy - and since _she_ was utterly beloved by all she met, that meant I was, perforce, the evil one.

I have been evil, now and again, I admit it; but I was not evil _then_.

She grew more beautiful with each year, and her power of causing adoration grew stronger, too. Soon it was enough for her to merely pass _near_ people and they would fall to their knees or trail after her, hoping for a single look, a bare word, anything to show she had noticed them. It played merry havoc with the servants, if she chose to wander through the kitchen during dinner preparations or the great hall while it was being cleaned, and I ordered her to remain in the solar with me for hours at a time, sewing and _staying out of the way_.

You will ask, I am sure, why I did not simply kill her and have done. The honest answer - though it stings my pride, rather - is that I couldn’t. I tried, several times. A poisoned apple - yes, that one has made it into the tales, I know. She ate the whole thing, core and all, and smiled at me when she finished, her teeth a little pointed, her eyes a little too wide. A fall - I tripped her down the stairs, and her broken body rose and healed at the bottom, and she smiled at me as though I had told a rather amusing tale, and went on her way without a pause. Her corset laced too tight - far too tight - tight enough to drive the breath from any mortal’s lungs - and she went down to the ball and danced the whole night through without a pause.

My witchery has always been a subtle thing, poisons and potions and scrying, not the war-witchery of some of my kinswomen. (We call each other kin, we of the witch-blood, regardless of our birth heritage.) When my first poison failed, I knew she was no ordinary construct, made of snow and a woman’s will - my poison would have melted such a creature easily enough. No, she was not human at all, but some fey dweller of the deep woods, drawn out by the first queen’s words and will, feasting on her mortal mother’s life to take a human form.

I put a geas on the huntsman, when the child turned sixteen. Another two years and she would be old enough to take the throne, and I did not want to know what sort of havoc she could wreak as _queen_. It was not a large country, admittedly, but still. Her people would gladly have gone to war for her, and can you imagine the disaster that an entire _nation_ of love-maddened berserkers could do? So I gave the huntsman a goblet of wine so laced with potions it must have tasted mostly of apples and magic, and laid my geas on him to take her out into the wilderness and cut out her heart. With luck, a mortal weapon in a mortal hand could do what all my witchery could not.

When he came back with a bloody heart in his hand, _almost_ I rejoiced. Almost.

But I am not a fool, and when I took the heart from him I knew at once it was not hers. A deer’s heart is not much like a human one, and not at all like whatever beats within _her_ breast. Still, it was not his fault that her magic had overpowered mine, and I thanked him and sent him away without letting on that I knew I had been tricked.

He told the tale, of course. I did not still his tongue, as perhaps I ought. And since the people loved her - the effect lingered many days after she was gone - the people knew only that I had tried to slay their dear princess, and their image of me as the foulest creature imaginable was confirmed. Even when the effect began to wear off, they had spent so long loving her and fearing me that the habit kept them in that old pattern.

It did not help that I had closeted myself away with my mirror, searching for hours every day to try to find out what on earth she _was_ , so that my next attempt to slay her might have some hope of success. A year and more I spent in such research, and at the end of it I knew only a very little more than I did at the beginning.

She was living with the dwarves by then - peaceful miners, who had been as easily taken over by her aura as any other person. They gave her the finest of the gems they dug, the most comfortable bed they could craft, the best food they could hunt or grow - she did not need to do anything more than smile at them now and again. It was a comfortable place for her, I am sure, and I suspect given the chance she would have remained there until her eighteenth birthday, and only then returned to cast me out and take her rightful throne.

But I could not allow that, and so when my research proved futile, I gave up on poisoning her, and instead I spent three days and nights brewing the strongest sleeping potion I could concoct, and then distilling and concentrating it until a single drop could render a bull unconscious. (Yes, I tested it, and very confused the herdsman was, too.) And then I soaked an apple in the stuff until it was more potion than fruit, and went out to find my stepdaughter again.

The tales say I disguised myself as an old woman. It is not true. What I did was _remove_ my disguise - I did not come to magic young, and only the truly black arts allow for the regaining of lost youth. The beauty I wore was a semblance, nothing more; it was as much as I cared to do to ensure that my joints did not ache, nor my bones grow brittle. Illusion works as well as reality when it comes to beauty, and takes less primping to maintain.

She knew me, of course. She looked at me with those dark inhuman eyes and knew me at once. Perhaps she had always been able to see the truth beneath my illusions, and so I looked no different to her than I ever had. But she had eaten of my poison once, and taken no harm of it, and so she laughed at me and took the apple, and ate.

I have rarely been prouder than I was at the moment she keeled over, utterly unconscious, half the apple yet uneaten.

Why did I not kill her where she lay helpless before me? Well, that is simple enough. I couldn’t. I cut open her chest to tear out her heart and found she did not have one - there was no heart at all within the bone cage of her ribs. There was _nothing_ , neither heart nor lungs nor any other organ. Frankly I was lucky she had to have a mouth and a tongue in order to look human, or even my sleeping potion would have failed. And when I took my hand out of her chest, she healed as swiftly as ever, and lay there looking delicate and disheveled, asleep - but for how long?

And then of course the dwarves returned, and I fled again to the castle, and watched in my mirror as they built her a coffin of crystal and diamond, and wept about it. I spent every day after that searching feverishly for any idea of what might finally _kill_ the creature - for that she would wake in time I had no doubt at all - and at last it seemed to me that there was only one option left to try, and that was fire. But how hot and large a fire would need to be to destroy her - that I did not know.

I was watching through my mirror when the prince found her, when he drew close enough to enter her aura, when he flung himself weeping on her coffin and begged the dwarves to let him take her home with him, there to adore her forever. Almost then I despaired - _another_ kingdom given over to her powers? But when he tore the coffin’s lid away to press his lips to hers she woke, as though she had only been waiting for such a moment, and perhaps indeed she had.

She told him of me, of course, and he swore at once to help her regain her rightful throne. He hardly had a hope of doing anything _else_ , not with her looking at him wide-eyed and pleading. That look was strong enough to break my most powerful geas; an unprotected mortal had no shields against it at all.

And as they made their way through the woods, well...I made my preparations.

I did say I was not a good witch. I sent the children from the castle, sent them far away; and as many of the servants as I could make excuses to order on distant errands, I did. But that left many mortals still within the castle’s walls, and then and now I thought it worth their lives to kill the creature which they so adored. I laced the castle’s walls with spells and potions, thick and deadly, each one of them so flammable that had a candle toppled the whole place would have gone up in flames, and then I spent the remaining hours wandering the halls to ensure no candle _did_ set the trap off too soon.

When they arrived, I was in the throne room, waiting, and as they entered every servant in the castle flocked to them, crying out in joy that their princess had returned. She called me ‘witch,’ then, and accused me of trying many times to slay her; and I admitted it, for every word was true. She ordered me seized and bound, and my feet strapped into red-hot shoes, that I might dance to welcome her - dance to my death at her command and will - and the people I had ruled for so many years sprang forward eagerly to do her bidding.

I locked the doors - it is a simple spell - and let the candle I was holding fall.

I have never seen such an inferno before or since. My potions worked more swiftly than I had dreamed; the flames rose instantly taller than a man, and devoured the servants and the poor besotted prince so swiftly they had not even time to scream. And then there were only we two left, in all that hall, myself and the snow-white princess.

She stood there wreathed in flames and _laughed_ , and laughed, and laughed, so loud it seemed to fill the world, and then, just when I had truly begun to despair - had begun to believe that even fire could not destroy her - she looked me in the eye and cried, “Well fought!” and _melted_ , all at once, turning first to water and then instantly to steam.

Of course I made it out. A witch doesn’t make it to her first century-mark without fire-proofing herself every way imaginable. I even managed to retrieve my mirror.

Is she dead? _I_ don’t know. She’s gone, that’s good enough for me - gone, at least until some other childless fool with a touch of witch-blood summons her. And I and my kinswomen know how to destroy her, now, so with a little luck we’ll be able to put an end to any future such creatures well before they get their hooks into an entire populace.

I do not claim to be the hero in this tale. I killed far more mortals than she ever did, and with as little compunction; as I said, I am not a _good_ witch. But it is tiring to be made out to be the _only_ evil creature in the whole tale, and so I have set this down so that anyone who cares to read the truth may know what really happened.

Now you know. Do with that what you will.

**Author's Note:**

> I am imaginarygolux on tumblr.


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